Full-Text Articles in Philosophy

Don’T Think Twice, It’S Alright, Hilary Kornblith

Philosophic Exchange

We arrive at most of our beliefs unreflectively. As we navigate the world, beliefs about our surroundings are, inevitably, simply produced in us. Similarly, the vast majority of our actions are unreflective. We don’t have to think about every little thing we do; we simply act. But we also, at times, stop to reflect: Is this what I should believe? Is this what I should do?

What does such reflective activity achieve? Some philosophers have suggested that reflecting about what we should believe is necessary if our beliefs are to be justified. In the case of action, some philosophers ...

Existential Inertia, Paul Audi

Philosophic Exchange

To all appearances, the basic building blocks of reality tend to keep existing unless something intervenes to destroy them. In other words, basic things seem to have existential inertia. But why might this be? This paper considers a number of arguments for and against existential inertia. It discusses arguments inspired by Aquinas, Descartes, and Spinoza, as well as considerations deriving from Occam’s Razor, entropy, and certain views about the nature of time and change.

Art, Pleasure, Value: Reframing The Questions, Mohan Matthen

Philosophic Exchange

In this essay, I’ll argue, first, that an art object's aesthetic value (or merit) depends not just on its intrinsic properties, but on the response it evokes from a consumer who shares the producer's cultural background. My question is: what is the role of culture in relation to this response? I offer a new account of aesthetic pleasure that answers this question. On this account, aesthetic pleasure is not just a “feeling” or “sensation” that results from engaging with a work of art. It is rather a mental state that facilitates engagement with an artwork, and (in ...

Should We Be Moved By What Motivates Expressivism?, Terence Cuneo

Philosophic Exchange

When two views differ as sharply as do realism and expressivism, it is easy for their proponents to talk past one another, failing to understand the other’s most fundamental commitments. My project in this essay is to bring these two very different views into conversation. I begin by offering a more specific characterization of both expressivism and realism, noting where some of their important differences lie. I then identify the primary rationale that expressivists offer for rejecting moral realism in favor of their view, an argument that has a long history in the expressivist tradition, which I refer to ...

The Self In The Age Of Cognitive Science: Decoupling The Self From The Personal Level, Robert D. Rupert

Philosophic Exchange

Philosophers of mind commonly draw a distinction between the personal level – the distinctive realm of conscious experience and reasoned deliberation – and the subpersonal level, the domain of mindless mechanism and brute cause and effect. Moreover, they tend to view cognitive science through the lens of this distinction. Facts about the personal level are given a priori, by introspection, or by common sense; the job of cognitive science is merely to investigate the mechanistic basis of these facts. I argue that this view misrepresents the structure of cognitive-scientific enquiry. Taken at face value, cognitive science makes no commitment to the existence ...

Conceptual Analysis And Its Limits, Karen Bennett

Philosophic Exchange

My topic is conceptual analysis and its limits. I will start by sketching what I mean by ‘conceptual analysis’, and saying a bit about how it is used in contemporary philosophy. Then I will point out two limitations of the method, and illustrate these limits with examples: some from the philosophical literature, and some from biology.

The Ethics Of Eating Meat, David Sobel

Philosophic Exchange

In this paper I argue for the claim that it is morally problematic to get as many of our calories as we do from factory farmed meat. I divide up the problems into the categories of 1) Harm to Animals, 2) Harm to the Environment, and 3) Harm to Humans. I conclude with a series of common defenses of eating factory-farmed meat and offer a reply to each. I conclude that it would be morally better to cut down on the amount of factory-farmed meat one eats provided one can afford and find palatable alternatives.

Aristotle And Darwin: Antagonists Or Kindred Spirits?, James G. Lennox

Philosophic Exchange

In the decades following the forging of the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis in the 1940s, a number of its philosophical defenders created a myth about what Charles Darwin was up against, a viewpoint called “typological essentialism” often attributed to Aristotle. In this paper I first sketch the history of how this myth was created. I then establish that it is a myth by providing an account of Aristotle’s essentialism as it is actually displayed in his philosophy of biology and in his biological practice. It has nothing to do with the ‘mythic’ version. We then turn to what Darwin was ...

Parfit’S ‘Triple Theory’ And Its Troubles, David Mcnaughton, Piers Rawling

Philosophic Exchange

Love And Duty, Julia Driver

Philosophic Exchange

The thesis of this paper is that there is an important asymmetry between a duty to love and a duty to not love: there is no duty to love as a fitting response to someone’s very good qualities, but there is a duty to not love as a fitting response to someone’s very bad qualities. The source of the asymmetry that I discuss is the two-part understanding of love: the emotional part and the evaluative commitment part. One cannot directly, or “at will,” control an emotional response, but one can undermine any commitment one would normally have under ...

Philosophic Exchange

Four decades ago, E.O. Wilson famously declared that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." One still finds Wilson’s idea echoed frequently in popular science writing today. While I’m not going to deny that evolutionary biology and other sciences have important things to tell us about morality, I think there is a lot of confusion about what exactly they can tell us, and how much they can tell us. My aim here is first to make some distinctions and sort out some issues, and then to ...

Adventures In Rationalism, Michael Della Rocca

Philosophic Exchange

Rationalism is the thesis that the world and all the things in the world are intelligible, through and through. Nothing happens for no reason. On the contrary, whatever takes place, whatever exists, takes place or exists for a reason. Everything. On this view there are no brute facts. Each thing that exists has a reason that is sufficient for explaining the existence of the thing. According to perhaps the most extreme implication of this view, even the world itself, the totality of all that exists, exists for a reason, has an explanation. Many philosophers today think that rationalism is a ...

Is Patriotism Immoral?, Richard Arneson

Philosophic Exchange

The principle of patriotism says that we are morally required to favor our own nation and its people. But there is an opposed moral perspective: cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan regards herself as a citizen of the world and holds that national borders lack intrinsic, noninstrumental moral significance. The cosmopolitan view is that people are people, and our common humanity is the ground of our moral duties toward people. This paper examines some recent arguments for patriotism, and finds them all wanting. In the absence of any good argument for patriotism, perhaps we should consider cosmopolitanism.

Free Will And Neuroscience, Alfred Mele

Philosophic Exchange

Has modern neuroscience shown that free will is an illusion? Those who give an affirmative answer often argue as follows. The overt actions that have been studied in some recent experiments do not have corresponding consciously made decisions or conscious intentions among their causes. Therefore no overt actions have corresponding consciously made decisions or conscious intentions among their causes. This paper challenges this inference, arguing that it is unwarranted.

Tired Of Capitalism? How About Something Better?, David Schweickart

Philosophic Exchange

Capitalism causes staggering inequality, rising unemployment, growing poverty, and the degradation of democracy. But is there any viable alternative? Is there a form of socialism that would preserve the strengths of competitive capitalism, yet mitigate its worst evils? This paper argues that there is such an alternative -- economic democracy. An economic democracy keeps competitive markets for goods and services, but dispenses with labor markets and capital markets. It replaces labor markets with worker ownership, and capital markets with democratic control of investment. These mechanisms will preserve the principal advantages of capitalism, while mitigating its worst evils.

Pragmatism In Philosophy: The Hidden Alternative, Simon Blackburn

Philosophic Exchange

This paper contrasts two ways of understanding the function of human thought and language. According to representationalism, the function of thought and language is to refer to entities in the world and assert truths about them. By contrast, pragmatism seeks to understand the function of thought and language without any such appeal, at the most fundamental level, to the concepts of truth or reference.

Re-Humanizing Descartes, Alison Simmons

Philosophic Exchange

Descartes’ mind-body dualism and his quest for objective knowledge can appear de-humanizing. My aim in this paper is to re-humanize Descartes. When we take a closer look at what Descartes actually says about human beings, it casts his entire thought in a much different light.

Aristotelian Happiness, Paula Gottlieb

Philosophic Exchange

Aristotle’s account of happiness aims to show that happiness is both objective and attainable. According to Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness benefits both the agent and other people too. This paper attempts to explain how Aristotle’s account supports these claims. Along the way, I argue that Aristotle’s much-maligned doctrine of the mean has some true and important implications concerning the nature and value of happiness.

"Crafting Natures": Aristotle On Animal Design, Mariska Leunissen

Philosophic Exchange

It is a commonplace in Aristotelian scholarship that the forms of living beings and the animal species to which they give rise are “fixed.” However, Aristotle’s biological works often stress the flexibility of nature during the development of animals. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to delineate the range of flexibility that Aristotle takes natures to have in the design of animals; and second, to draw out the implications of this for Aristotle’s embryology and theory of natural teleology.

The Ontological Argument And Objects Of Thought, Edward Wierenga

Philosophic Exchange

Is there anything new to be said about Anselm's ontological argument? Recent work by Lynne Baker and Gareth Matthews raises some interesting and important questions about the argument. First, Anselm's argument is set in the context of a prayer to God, whose existence Anselm seeks to prove. Is that peculiar or paradoxical? Does it imply that Anselm's prayer is insincere? Baker and Matthews have offered a novel interpretation of Anselm's argument, designed to solve a crucial problem with it. Does their interpretation succeed in solving that problem? This paper addresses both of these questions.

Philosophic Exchange

The eudaimonistic thesis claims that being virtuous is a necessary aspect of the development of some important kind of happiness. To be true, it must be the case that virtue is associated with a kind of happiness that is clearly recognizable as something that we want, that we can appreciate as a good state for us to be in, that we can identify as a state of our own well-being. So here is the empirical question: in our ordinary experiences, is it the case that virtue is necessary to developing this kind of state? This is a very large, and ...

Philosophy Of Perception And The Phenomenology Of Visual Space, Gary Hatfield

Philosophic Exchange

My aim in this paper is to consider various forms of perceptual realism, including, for purposes of comparison, the largely abandoned indirect or representative realism. After surveying the variety of perceptual realisms and considering their various commitments, I introduce some considerations concerning the phenomenology of visual space that cause trouble for most forms of direct realism. These considerations pertain to the perception of objects in the distance and, secondarily, to the perception of shapes at a slant. I argue that one of the lesser known varieties of perceptual realism, critical direct realism, can meet the challenges offered by the facts ...

Alcibiades And The Politics Of Rumor In Thucydides, C.D.C. Reeve

Philosophic Exchange

This is a story about Alcibiades, about Athens, and about the politics of rumor. When rumor set its claws into Alcibiades, it contributed not only to his own downfall, but to the downfall of Athens. The very traits that made Alcibiades an effective public figure also made him vulnerable to rumor. In the end, Thucydides himself excised rumor from his own histories because he came to see its destructive force

Structuralism, Anti-Structuralism And Objectivity, Derk Pereboom

Philosophic Exchange

Structuralist theories describe the entities in their domains solely in terms of relations, while also claiming to be complete theories of the entities in question. Leibniz and Kant insist that no structuralist theory can be a complete theory. Kant believes that the knowledge afforded by structuralist theories is sufficient. However, Jacques Derrida is skeptical of the sufficiency of structuralist theories for stable knowledge of any kind.

Love As Intimate Identification, Bennett Helm

Philosophic Exchange

It is widely acknowledged that love is a distinctively intimate form of concern in which we in some sense identify with our beloveds; it is common, moreover, to construe such identification in terms of the lover’s taking on the interests of the beloved. From this starting point, Harry Frankfurt argues that the paradigm form of love is that between parents and infants or young children. I think this is mistaken: the kind of loving attitude or relationship we can have towards or with young children is distinct in kind from that which we can have towards adult persons, as ...

Trust As Robustly Moral, Alisa Carse

Philosophic Exchange

Trust is more than mere reliance on another person. To trust someone is to rely on her goodwill for the care of something valuable. It is to have a confident expectation that the other person will take care of the valuable thing because she recognizes its value to you. It is to expect her to take care of it because she recognizes that she should take care of it. Therefore trust is a robustly moral attitude.